Back in 2020 and 2021, while the Penn Libraries were largely closed, many of our librarians worked from home on the Deep Backfile project that I’ve written about here before. Faced with more demand than ever for online access to our collections while most users couldn’t go into our libraries, we researched the copyrights of some of the many thousands of journals, magazines, newspapers, and other serials in our collections. We hoped that documenting their public domain status could pave the way to making them more widely available not just to users of our library, but to readers in many other places as well.

By the time our library buildings fully reopened in 2021, our librarians had researched and reported on the copyright status of over 8,000 serials owned by Penn. They also found free online copies of at least some issues in over 2,000 of those serials. Our plan for the project was to do two reviews of every serial, one based on filling out a questionnaire we developed, and one done by someone with more expertise to review and edit the initially reported data, and to create a linked data record for it.

I’m pleased to announce that that second review is now complete. We now have copyright data for all the serials our librarians worked on now published as JSON linked data, connected with Wikidata, available in bulk on Github, and linked to free online content that our librarians found (via The Online Books Page)

When combined with other work, such as the JSON records we have now made for all other serials in our first-copyright-renewals list, our full Deep Backfile knowledge base now covers over 12,000 serials. The free serials available via The Online Books Page now amount to over 25,000 titles, many of them automatically imported from the Directory of Open Access Journals, but over 7,500 more with records we’ve created especially for The Online Books Page. (And that doesn’t include many thousands of additional older serials on HathiTrust that we list but don’t yet have serial-specific records for.)

Many thanks

As you can see in the Credits section of the project page, a lot of people have worked on the Deep Backfile since 2020. I’m grateful to all of them. I want to especially thank Rachelle Nelson, who managed and trained library workers, Jim Hahn and Kathleen Burlingame, who coded automated creation of Wikidata entries for the serials for many of the serials, Jie Li, who created many of the Online Books records for serials with free online content, and Beth Picknally Camden, Joe Zucca, and Emily Morton-Owens, who supported having library workers at Penn work on this project (among others) while our library buildings were largely closed. Some library workers also continued to put time into the project even after they reopened. Our most prolific contributors, Pete Sullivan and Nat Bender, each researched more than 1,000 serials. But there were also many other contributors who filled out questionnaires or created Wikidata entries, and whether they did it for just a few titles, or hundreds or more, their contributions are valued.

I hear regularly from readers around the world that use these and other serials online, thankful that they can access and read sources that were previously obscure or difficult to access in their research. The copyright information that the Deep Backfile team worked on has also been noticed by a number of digitization projects. The Internet Archive’s Serials in Microfilm project has been scanning microfilms and opening access for some of the serials we documented. HathiTrust conducted a pilot program for reviewing copyrights, based in part on our work, that led to them opening access to a small number of the serials we researched, and we now have a Deep Backfile table focusing on HathiTrust serial titles that might be openable there, if members are interested in supporting copyright review for them. As I noted in a talk I gave in January, we’ve also created another Deep Backfile table highlighting serials that have articles about them in English Wikipedia. We may also be able to take advantage of the information we’ve gathered for our own digitizations at Penn.

What’s next

We have a lot of information now about the rights and availability of many public domain serials. But there’s a lot of information we don’t yet have. The Penn Libraries own a lot of other serials we didn’t get to in our 2020-2021 survey. We don’t yet have information on a lot of the potentially public domain serials mentioned in Wikipedia. HathiTrust, the Internet Archive, and a lot of smaller sites now provide freely readable copies of serials we don’t yet list, including both public domain content and content freely licensed by the publishers or authors. And many of the large publishers and aggregators still include lots of public domain serial content behind paywalls.

So we could go in a variety of directions in further expanding our knowledge base. Which directions we focus on may depend on interest, support, and available resources. For now, I plan to take a short pause: first, for a vacation for much of the rest of this month, and then for working on some other digital library projects that have been in progress for a while (some of which you may hear about eventually).

But if you find this knowledge base of interest, I invite you to contribute more to it. To that end, I’ve adapted the questionnaire we developed for Penn librarians and now make it available for all of our Deep Backfile tables. Feel free to check it out, and fill it out for as few or as many serials as you like. Is there a serial on Wikipedia you’re interested in that we don’t yet have copyright information on? Feel free to select the “Contact us” link and answer the questions you see there. Annoyed when you hit an unwarranted paywall for an old or long-running journal at one of the big publishers, or a big aggregator? Go to its Deep Backfile table and help us document what’s public domain, and could be provided online by others even if a paywall exists elsewhere. Know of an authorized or public domain archive of one of the serials we mention? You can also use the “Contact us” links, or our general suggestion form, to let us know about additional content we can link to.

I’ve been gratified to regularly hear from readers who are using or are interested in the serials we now cover. And after I get back from vacation, I look forward to hearing more of what you’re interested in, and in reviewing any information you send us. Thank you again!